What your favorite item auto-sort styles?

Simply put, I'd like to know what your preferred method of the auto-sort function is. This is for a personal study, as well as trying to get an idea of what sorting filter I want on AR-PUH-GUH! to help players out.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
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I like sorting by usage because no matter who's game you play, you can always find the item your looking for. Alphabetical is good too but the problem I find with alphabetical is that everyone names things differently to suit their game style. ex) a potion may instead be called a cure, hamburger, healthpack, life restorer...etc. This means I have to learn what each item is for that specific game. Sorting by type solves this issue by grouping 'like' things together, this way it's easier to understand what things are weapons, cures and so on.

Just my opinion though. I'd also like to see what other people prefer.

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The item sorting in the Final Fantasy games is to put usable stuff on top, followed by equipment sorted by type. This is very good and very usable.

One problem with this is that you don't get that sort of granularity in the OHRRPGCE unless you sort by item ID and make sure your item IDs are arranged just right. Alpha sorting works pretty well if you have icons, especially if you've alpha-sorted your icon types just right.

That said, I've never seen an OHR game do item sorting very impressively.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Alpha Sorting using item icons is basically the way I will do it in my games for the foreseeable future, until we can start reading/writing more item data via plotscripting.

Personally, my favorite style is usable on top, with the ability to manually put things elsewhere. (Usable on top but let me put Elixir first instead of Potion)

However, I'm more and more becoming a fan of games without "total" inventory systems at all. Games could and should ideally be context sensitive and basically know what you're looking for. Why should the "Item" menu in battle show anything that isn't usable at all? We already do this with equip menus: we can only see sensible (ie equippable) items, so why not do this elsewhere? Some games (such as Tales) do this by separating item menus into tabs, but even then this gets ridiculously unwieldy (Pokemon)

A way to look at this particular issue is to sort of "reverse" the item paradigm that we have right now. Take Pokemon for instance. We go to our TM box and now go through 100 TMs to look for a particular move. We can sort by number, which is arbitrary, so we don't. So we can sort by Name, which only helps if you straight up know the name of the ability you want. What if you just want to know the best [element] move you have available to you at the time? Sure, you could add a dozen more sort parameters, to find the best "Autosort" available, but why not reverse the way you use them? Select a Pokemon, then select TMs from a list only of ones they can learn. Don't replace the old system, but allow them both together.

This is the sort of approach I'm trying to take with Silhouette, though you can't really completely see this now since the only playable demo isn't very far. But it's clearly noticeable: I had some playtesters express "Where is my inventory menu?" and my goal here isn't to add such a menu, but instead to make the experience seamless enough that you don't notice its absence. I have a long way to go, of course, but I have no deadline.

tl;dr sort isn't necessarily the best way to organize item lists

I almost never actually use the sort feature. I let my items accumulate as they will, and use them where I find them. I will occasionally manually arrange a specific few items to a convenient slot near the top, but always manually, never automatically.

I tend to use autosort then go about sorting things I want up top afterwards. So it's like a combo for me.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
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Personally I'm still hoping for by-character inventories.

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Yes

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
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I've got Okédoké set up with an alphabetical sorting mode that uses item icons to get everything in the right place. I also used most of the blank space at the end of the font for extras, so that the healing items and other usable things always end up toward the top of the list when sorted (and items without an icon show up in the right place, rather than before everything else, because their first letters are actually a different font character than a normal A, D, K, R, M, etc.)

That seems to work pretty well to me, so I'll probably set my other games (and any possible future ones) up with a similar system once I get back to working on them again. I'll probably wait until I'm near-finished with them first, though, because having to trim all the fancy font letters out of the .hsi files every time I export a new one gets a little irritating. (Seriously, there should be an option to leave out anything but standard alphabet/numbers when exporting .hsi files... having half of your item icons turn up in the .hsi as some random symbol from the new expanded font is annoying.)

Before I set this up, I always used the "by whether or not it's usable" mode, so use-out-of-battle items always went to the top of the list and everything else was kind of jumbled throughout the rest. I like the sorta-alphabetical version a lot better, though.

Item ID Number mode seems like it would have the same result... but only if you planned out your items so well that there's none in the wrong place. I guess that could work with a short game that doesn't have too many items to begin with, but in a full-length RPG that seems like taking the whole "planning things out ahead of time" thing a bit too far...

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Oh hoooo, tricksy. I like your way of thinkin'.

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Opps! I admit I was aware of this problem, but I forgot about it because I never use icons in the names of maps, items, etc. I've just completed an elaborate fix for this. From the sounds of it, you started with the default font and then replaced some or all of the "Latin-1" part of the font at the end. Go to the font editor and set the font type to ASCII, and it'll treat those characters as icons and won't export them in .hsi files. (Requires a nightly, wait a day)

As for item sorting, it sounds like an new piece item data, "sort priority", and an autosort option which sorts based on it would be a good (and rather easy) feature. And the priority can be used as a secondary criteria if the autosort option is something else.

I use autosort sometimes, but usually manually rearrange items how I like them.

My sort list preference is as follows:

1. Health restoration items.
2. Status cure items. (Like Antidotes and whatnot.)
3. Revival from death items.
4. Weapons.
5. Armors.
6. Relics/extras.

Same here. XD

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"One can never improve enough nor should one stop trying to improve."

Sounds to me like the engine could benefit from having "category" and "rank" settings for items in the event that a player would want to prioritize specific items in a certain way:

Categories:

-Health
-Magic
-Offense
-Defense
-Special
-Type 6
-Type 7
-Type 8

(Each category could be renamed in the global strings menu. Items that can't be dropped would have its own category.)

Rank:

-30 HP Boost (Rank 1)
-50 HP Boost (Rank 2)
etc.

So, instead of sorting by alphabet, you sort by rank or value.

I would actually be interested in something like this.

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